This past week, New York City parents learned whether their precious tots got into the city’s most exclusive private schools.

It ends a ruthless process where parents spent 18 months hunting down heads of state, moneyed elite, and even the Dalai Lama for letters of recommendation.

“If you look at the private schools in New York and tally up the number of kindergarten spots and tally up the number of kids there are, it’s a very small percentage of kids who are going to get in,” said one Upper East Side mom with a 7-year-old daughter currently enrolled at a $50,000-a-year private school (her fourth choice).

“At Trinity, I had two board members that I knew who I called and they didn’t even look at my application . . . A little, nice white Jewish girl who lives on the Upper East Side isn’t as interesting as the half American half Chinese kid whose father is really rich, or a couple who’s half Indian and half Filipino who were living in Singapore and moving back to New York, or a transgender kid.

“I used every connection I had,” she admitted of her herculean effort to avoid enrolling her child in, gasp, a public school. “You look at members of the board and think, ‘Who do I know that’s super powerful and has a connection to the school who will vouch for me?’ ”

Amanda Uhry, the president of Manhattan Private School Advisors, which works with approximately 1,200 families annually for pre-school through high school admissions, says the average kindergarten class at a top Manhattan private school has about 60 spots, with “25 percent of those spots automatically going to siblings or legacies.” For coveted schools like Dalton, there can be 1,500 applicants for one spot, according to Uhry.

It’s no surprise, then, that scoring a big-time letter of recommendation has become a competitive sport for tiger moms.

Dana Haddad, a former admissions director at Horace Mann School and Clarement Preparatory School who now has her own consulting firm, New York Admissions, says she’s seen parents set up “accidental” run-ins with potential letter-writers.

“I’ve had people try to get on the same spin bikes so they can be next to someone who is influential,” Haddad said.

Others go from bike to bench.

“At one point, before he passed away, former Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist made a recommendation for a 4-year-old,” said Haddad. In the letter, Rehnquist gushed that he could see the child becoming a Supreme Court Justice.

And then there are the recommendations from former President Bill Clinton: “Those are a dime a dozen,” Haddad said.

Another admissions insider said it’s rumored one can “buy” a letter from Clinton with a donation.

“I’ve heard that people who are supporters of the [Clinton] Foundation get letters of rec from Bill,” said the source. “This rumor is as absurd as it is false,” said a spokesman for Clinton.

Uhry said she’s also had clients reach out to higher authorities.

“Anybody who wants to go to Catholic school, ‘Oh, I know somebody in the Vatican!’ What, did the Pope go to Gymboree with your kid?” she joked.

“We recommend to our clients that you know the person or that the person has at least met your child or knows what your child looks like,” she added.

The Dalton SchoolHelayne Seidman

Sometimes parents whip out the big guns as early as preschool.

The UES mom said the director of her chichi pre-school recalled having former Gov. George Pataki ring her personally while he was in office.

“She told me, ‘I’m sitting in my office and they said George Pataki is on the phone but I know he’s not calling to offer me the Chancellor of Education position.’ She was put off by it,” said the mother.

Roxana Reid, an educational advisor at Smart City Kids Inc., even had an admissions officer tell her about receiving a letter from the Dalai Lama.

“But that doesn’t curry favor with schools. The relationship with the school matters most,” said Reid.

Victoria Goldman, author of “The Manhattan Family Guide to Private Schools,” agrees. “The old saying, ‘the thicker the file, the thinner the candidate’ holds more true today than ever.”

Especially when the letter-writer is a nobody.

“We had somebody who had the son-in-law of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer, write a letter,” said Uhry. “I was like, ‘Are you joking?’ ”

And while a recommendation can help if your child is head-to-head with another kid, it can just as easily spell their doom.

“Last year, we had a family applying to a top-tier school who worked at one of the investment banking firms, whose boss of the boss of the boss’ kids also went to that school,” said Uhry. Her client secured a letter from the top honcho.

“As it turns out, the top school can’t stand the sight of the boss of a boss of a boss,” said Uhry. “So guess what? The people got rejected.”

Haddad added, “You want to be very careful not affiliating yourself with a family that’s . . . persona non grata at a school.”

One of Uhry’s clients, a famous designer, had five letters of recommendation swearing “the kid was basically Mozart and a musical genius with his violin.

“The kid went in for his interview and could barely squeak out ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.’ It was awful,” she said.

Despite parents’ mania, the game is shifting, said Uhry.

“It’s about the child now, it’s not about the parents and their connections,” she said. “They discovered that sometimes those fabulous parents have a kid who can’t cut it at Horace Mann.”

But one parent, waiting to hear Friday if their kindergartner got into Trinity, Dalton or Horace Mann, called it “a fixed game.”

“It’s the way a country club would decide who gets in,” said the Manhattan entrepreneur. “But this is a bizarre 21st century club where if you make it to kindergarten in these schools you are set for life.”